How do you rate tier 1 Chinese companies? (cheap, cons, quality)

[willister]

I'm specically referring to companies like Huawei and Lenovo in electronics. Lesser knows are that of Geely (owner of Volvo), Midea (trying to purchase German robotics maker Kuka), Haier and Hisense.


I really like Huawei, they really remind me of Samsung back in the early 2000s, at a stage when it was sort of shaking the market and getting into smart phones but not yet a serious threat to the likes of Sony/Nokia but you could see their huge potential.


At the moment I would say that Samsung might be a few years ahead of Huawei overall, much like Sony was back in the early 2000s. I can pretty much assume though Samsung do see Huawei in the rear mirrors at the moment.


Geely is probably also somewhat of an interesting lot - they purchase Volvo, turned it around somewhat, but can they learn off their subsidiary? The new lines of Volvo are mostly great and have won universal praise, especially the XC90. They have also collaborated on shared modular platforms, you do see progress on one of their cars - the Emgrand which won car of the year in China. That was designed by a German or Swedish car designer who use to work for VW though. If they can nail of some the famed Swedish safety back into their vehicles and undercut Toyota/Hyundai by $5K on similar vehicles I reckon they could conquer the mid level vehicle market in 10 years time or at least get a decent foot hold.


Midea is another that could become quite good with it's intended purchase on Kuka. If that deal does go ahead, again like Geely, how much tech can they absorb, does it have enough $ to splash into R&D to keep Kuka world class? There are really only four major robotics companies in the world - Kuka (Germany), ABB (Switzerland), Fanuc/Fujitsu (Japan) & Yaskawa (Japan). Since Kuka provides a lot of the robots to Tesla, Boeing, Airbus, these are lucrative industries Midea could possibly break into.


Haier and Hisense - Don't seem much, leaders in China possibly by volume but probably competing on price alone and somewhat decent quality.


Lenovo seems somewhat of a huge disappointment, they purchased out IBM's line of laptops and low end servers but don't seem to be doing anything pioneering with sales falling rapidly for PCs, laptops etc. Value wise, their products aren't exactly cheap either.


Many of these up and comings seem like they aren't quite there yet but do have the momentum. Interestingly even though Samsung is currently a behemoth I don't see them as what Sony was - yes, they are now king of consumer electronics but they haven't really pioneered anything like the Walkman, CD etc etc.